While President Donald Trump shares a prolific amount of fake, often AI-generated content on social media, there is a pattern to what he does and doesn’t post that reveals something important about the problems created under his administration. To that end, on Monday, USA Today columnist Rex Huppke raised a question about Trump’s posting habits: what is he not bragging about?
As Huppke notes, when Trump reentered office, he and his allies made many “promises to lower food and gas prices and usher in an economic Golden Age, along with a guarantee that Trump was ‘not going to start a war.’” It has since become clear that the “promises Trump and Republican lawmakers made haven’t panned out. At all. So now they have nothing to share with the American public beyond the grout and the growling and whatever fake content Trump posts on his Truth Social account.” In recent weeks, Trump has posted a steady stream of AI slop, asserts Huppke, for an important reason: “Trump posts AI nonsense because he's done nothing worth bragging about[.] Trump brags more than anyone, and all we’re getting from him is garbage and insipid distractions.”
Huppke offers a string of recent examples, from Trump’s post of an AI-generated video that showed him replacing a "Lake Ontario" sign with a "Lake America" sign, to posts about his D.C. vanity projects, to “an AI-generated image of him arm in arm with the late Dolly Parton. Totally fake. Never happened. And absolutely useless to any American worried about kitchen-table issues, or the war with Iran that Trump started, or the myriad food recalls occurring under this administration.”
What are Trump and the Republicans “not doing?” asked Huppke. “They’re not bragging about all they’ve accomplished in the nearly two years they’ve been in complete control of our government[.] You don’t see Trump ginning up AI videos of people celebrating the low cost of pantry staples. You don’t see Republican lawmakers on news shows bragging about how successfully they’ve driven down our grocery bills. Trump isn’t on Truth Social crowing about keeping America out of dumb, endless wars, because we’re stuck right in the middle of one with Iran, thanks to Trump. You don’t see Republicans gathering around the president to promote how much they’ve helped American farmers. That’s because Trump’s tariffs and now his new trade war with Canada have added dramatically to U.S. farmers’ economic woes. There are no AI-generated images of a winged Trump descending over a heartland farm and being greeted like he was heaven-sent.”
Instead, Trump posts fake AI slop and attacks polls that reveal his historic unpopularity. According to Huppke, “Trump's attack on polls shows he's desperate – and wounded. On Aug. 30, clearly upset by his pitiful polling numbers, Trump posted: ‘THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL.’” But as Huppke notes, “Trump’s AI slop is fake. The polls are not.”
